Astronomer, a Cincinnati startup that helps companies manage their flow of data has raised a massive $213 million Series C — the region’s third nine-figure fundraise in a seven-month span and the second-largest venture capital announcement in Cincinnati startup history.
The round, announced Wednesday, was led by New York-based growth equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation by Meritech Capital, Salesforce Ventures, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, Sutter Hill Ventures, Venrock and Sierra Ventures.
Astronomer, founded in 2015 in Over-the-Rhine, is developing modern data orchestration tools, powered by Apache Airflow, an open source platform for data engineering pipelines. Astronomer will also use the capital to grow its engineering and customer success teams, accelerate the growth of its Apache Airflow platform and scale its go-to-market operations.
The funding also allowed Astronomer to acquire California-based Datakin, a data operations tool.
"As companies of all sizes struggle to make sense of their data, data orchestration has become a competitive necessity," Joe Otto, CEO of Astronomer, said in a release. "At the same time, data teams must be able to trust their data to effectively extract its value. By integrating Datakin's features with Astronomer, our customers are able to build faster, run with confidence and reduce their operational risks."
Terms of its deal with Datakin were not disclosed. Laurent Paris, Datakin’s CEO, is also now listed as senior vice president of research and development at Astronomer. Paris said joining forces will accelerate growth at both companies.
Astronomer has been largely quiet about its recent growth; the company has increased its headcount 10-fold since 2020 with 250 global employees with customers in more than 35 countries. Astronomer maintains additional hubs in New York, San Francisco and San Jose.
Astronomer said Airflow has emerged as the “de facto standard” to express data flows as code, with 8 million monthly downloads, up from 180,000 in 2018. Astronomer engineers represent 16 of the top 25 all-time contributors to the platform.
The raise brings Astronomer’s total funding to nearly $290 million, per Courier research; Over-the-Rhine-based Refinery Ventures and CincyTech are among the company’s original backers.
With the round, Astronomer rises in the ranks as one of the region's top-funded startups. Enable Injections, an Evendale-headquartered medical device maker, announced a $215 million Series C in January. That topped a $160 million Series B raised by Hamilton-based vertical farming startup 80 Acres in August last year.
